


god knows i'm good

by cat (fightasone)



Category: Doctor Strange (Comics), Marvel
Genre: Backstory, Body Horror, Death, Derealization, Drowning, Gen, Prophetic Dreams, Suicidal Thoughts, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-14
Updated: 2013-05-14
Packaged: 2017-12-11 21:32:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/803478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fightasone/pseuds/cat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>And I saw the multitude of faces, honest, rich and clean.</i> | He knows the difference between alive and dead. He knows it very well.</p>
            </blockquote>





	god knows i'm good

**Author's Note:**

> original backstory for MCU-616 fusion roleplay Stephen Strange

_surely God won’t look the other way_

  
  
  
  


He knows the difference between alive and dead. He knows it very well. 

He is seven and sitting on the edge of the pool, dangling his legs in the water, watching his sister do laps. She’s showing off, wearing her swim team suit, doing flips when she nears the end and kicking off. Stephen doesn’t like swimming, he gets water in his ears and Donna is always faster, better, splashing when she shouldn’t be. But he admits, in his child’s mind, that today, she’s very impressive. Everyone is very proud. 

Later, she goes out to do laps when no one is home, even though mother told her not to and Stephen begged her to wait because he liked to watch, he wanted to join the swim team, too. 

The doctors say she had an aneurysm. 

It wouldn’t have mattered if anyone had been home anyway.

They say, over and over again, like some bizarre, twisted mantra that Stephen will hear in his sleep, will say to a thousand husbands, wives, parents, friends: “She didn’t feel any pain.”

  
  
  
  
He’s nine when Victor is born, and there will always be a warm chasm between them, Stephen will always steal his brother’s drinks and Victor will always call on Saturdays, at some ungodly hour, and leave a voicemail from the middle of a club, or a party, or a subway and Stephen will always get back to him, eventually, until his brother is gone. 

Their father will always be gray, always ashen-faced and in constant mourning for his daughter. This will never change, not until the moment he dies, and he knows he’s going to be with her, somewhere. 

  
  
  
  
When he’s seventeen, they go to India for the first time, to visit his mother’s family. His father stays home, working through the trip, but if Donna were there, they’d all be together, and Victor would probably be there, too, because his mother had always wanted another boy. Stephen pretends that she _is_ there while they walk through the streets, and he takes pictures of things he thinks she would have loved. She’d be in college, probably on a swim scholarship, definitely happy. She’d say _Come here, we’ll get a place together, you and me, we’ll tear this town apart_ and Stephen would fuss and fight but go to her side in an instant.

As soon as they’re home, he goes to her grave, buried because their father had insisted and their mother couldn’t fight it, and he digs a hole and buries the photos he took. 

It’s the last time he’ll go there for many, many years.

  
  
  
  
“That’s _dead_ tissue, Strange. Leave it alone.”

“It isn’t _all_ dead.”

“Oh the immovable Stephen Strange.” His lab partner rolls his eyes and turns away. “I’m going home. You cook your brain here all night if you wanna, dork.” 

The truth is that is all dead, every bit of it. But Stephen keeps poking, thinking about ways you might bring it back. He imagines touching the slide with his finger, making a spark, breathing fresh color back into the sample. He pictures touching dead brain matter this way, its pinkness coming back full-force, spreading over nerve cells and all the curls and wrinkles hidden under the skull. 

  
  
  
  
“You have _great_ hands,” the girl says. He thinks her name is Madeline, or something. She’s cornered him at a party and she smells like gin and limes and sand. She’s swaying against him, drunk and slow, and Stephen sways back, senses dulled by his third or fourth shot. He has a steady mental image of how the alcohol is swiftly moving through his body, and he knows exactly what time he’ll wake up in the morning and how much aspirin he’ll need to take. She will most likely be sick, and if she stays in his apartment, he’ll have to clean it up. 

He goes home with her instead and leaves before ten. She will find him again, later, sober and sharp and pointing at him with a scalpel in one hand and a sheep’s spleen in another. 

“You owe me _dinner_ , Stephen Strange.”

Fair is fair. He spends four years of his life falling in and out of love with her, until she gets a residency in Los Angeles and leaves him at the airport. 

  
  
  
  
Victor is barely eighteen when their mother dies. He calls Stephen in the middle of the night, _Mama’s sick, she’s so sick, please come home and save her._ Stephen comes home, but he tells his brother he can’t, that her disease is too far gone, and she is slipping away.

“Ma isn’t ma anymore,” his brother says, but he spends every minute at her bedside, reading her favorite books and bringing her mugs of tea. 

“You’ll take care of him? When she’s gone?” Stephen stands in his father’s study, lifting the photo of Donna during her failed stent as a ballerina, recycled in the photo as a Halloween costume, Stephen standing resolutely next to her in some kind of cape and mask. 

The irony will only be funny much later in life. 

“Victor?” His father nods. “I suppose. He’ll need someone. Where will you go?”

“Nowhere. Just can’t take care of the boy without his mother. Mistake to have him, you know.”

“That’s enough of that.” Stephen sets the photo down sharply. “I’ll take him, if it’s too much of a trial for you.” His father looks at him sadly. Stephen softens. “Dad. What do _you_ need?”

“Rest.” He takes his son’s hand. “I need rest.”

  
  
  
  
Two years later, he gets it. 

“I’ll tell them you said hey.” 

A week later, Victor leaves. It’s an amicable separation. Stephen has work in New York and between the two of them, there’s nothing left for them to go back to. 

Alone, Stephen creates something for himself. 

  
  
  
  
“He’s a selfish, nasty, _miserable_ piece of shit, and I won’t work with him.” Stephen leans against the wall, listening to another beautifully worded tirade against him. The chief of surgery can only make so many excuses. Mostly because they’re right, and Stephen knows it.

He understand that other people know grief. He isn’t _stupid_ by any means. 

But he scattered his brother’s ashes the week before, and he just doesn’t have it in him to feel sympathy. 

He’s getting in the elevator, staring at the line of buttons, contemplating their use and their value. What good is a dozen floors of rooms when people only die, in the end? Skilled hands or not. Someone pushes past him, whispers, _Dormamu._

“ _What?_ ” Stephen turns sharply toward the resident. 

“I said, _could you move._ ” The kid shakes his head. “Jackass.”

  
  
  
  
Stephen hears that word everywhere he goes. 

He takes a week off for the first time in three years and sits at home, photos scattered in a crooked arch around him. He wonders if it’s here, between his mother drawings and his father’s handkerchiefs that reek of tobacco, _Dormamu, Dormamu, Dormamu._

  
  
  
  
Laying in a ditch, his own car crushing his hands, he hears his wheels spin and the noise they make sounds like someone screaming.

_Dormamu._

  
  
  
  
To say he turns the world inside out is an understatement, though with his hands the way they are, he gets nowhere fast. Reality is a privilege, he thinks, and he is not allowed there anymore. He exists between worlds, dreaming in fits at night and seeing red, bleeding rage, _Dormamu_ on his lips, hands shaking uncontrollably. He is running out of money and out of time and there is nothing left for him to do. 

He thinks about that elevator. All the useless numbers. He could go to the top and float gently to the bottom. They say it’s not the impact that kills you anyway. It’s the surrender of life. 

But Stephen cannot bring himself to leave. He is the last remaining member of his family, and if his mother were here, she’d be more than disappointed. Stephen thinks if his mother were here, he would have remained kind, instead of his disposition going sour. Even Victor kept him pleasant enough, but he has bred loneliness into his bones and it seems like it covers him, like a scab, and he will never shake it off. 

  
  
  
  
  


In the winter, he hears magic. 

  
  
  
  


“I won’t cure you, Strange.” The Ancient One’s hands tap the arm of his chair and he has a pleasant, peaceful smile on his lips. “But I can teach you.”

“ _Teach me?_ Teach me _what?_ ”

“Your perspective is skewed. You fail to see what the actual problem is.”

“The problem is my _hands_. Are you _blind?_ ” 

“No.” The Ancient One leans forward. “But you are.”

  
  
  
  
Stephen spends several days on the compound, watching the other students. There is one, an angry-faced man named Mordo, who speaks like a snake and throws terrible, violent glances toward their teacher, has absolutely not an ounce of kindness in his body, and Stephen doesn’t trust him. Doesn’t like him. 

He isn’t _surprised_ when Mordo tries to kill the Ancient One, but he’s surprised at himself, surprised that he tries to _do_ something, when he knows nothing. 

“I want to learn,” he says. “I want to see.”

The Ancient One smiles. “And so you will.”

  
  
  
  
When he leaves, Wong goes with him. 

“My family is born to serve the Sorcerer Supreme.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Stephen says. Wong raises an eyebrow. “But I could most certainly use a friend.” _God knows I’ve made none._ Wong nods and returns with him to the city.

“Where will we go? You have no home.”

A week later, standing outside the clapboard home on Bleeker Street, Stephen turns to his friend and smiles. 

“Yes,” Wong says, grinning. “I believe this will do nicely.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> face claim for Stephen is Irrfan Khan, in case you wanted a dose of _holy shit you're pretty_. and a bit of reference on the India stuff. essentially, i wanted to make stephen a person of color, especially someone from the area where a lot of his magic and backstory comes from. a friend suggested irrfan khan, and i couldn't say no.


End file.
